Too many cats

With Xopher off on his free and easy journey of love and family, I'm
now chief pat giver for Emily and Manson and Printy. I'm not at all
sure that I'm up to the job.

Each of them has unique needs: Emily requires eight to ten hours a day
of human contact and a dedicated team to clean up after her; Manson
needs someone to sit on and love; Printy needs time to realise that
there aren't any other cats around and so she can come get pats.

Since I've been leaving for work earlier than ever before, and usually
arriving home after seven, they're just not happy. Emily's almost
complete blindness means that she needs to be not only patted, but
talked to (where upon she'll walk into me, then fall over patting
herself on whatever part of me she walked in to), and she does not
leave Xopher's room except to eat. So when I go in to talk to her and
give her some pats to make up for the fact that Xopher's not home,
within about five minutes Manson will be sitting in the doorway
yowling for pats. If I ignore him he'll come into the room, which
drives Emily into paroxysms of rage and growling and that's not a good
thing. So I usually go to pat him. But then I smell like him, so when
I come back to see Emily again, she chokes on her hatred of all things
Manson anyway. (To be fair, she is very old and quite tiny and she
can't see, so smelling The Enemy is the only way she knows they're
there, and I don't blame her for being a little tense about it.)

Because Xopher is not home, the house is locked up a lot more, and
Manson hates this. He's always huffily running inside or outside
whenever the doors are open. This morning when I let him in, he was so
lonely that he followed me around as I got dressed. I didn't really
have time to give him the dedicated pats he deserved, so he attacked
my shoelaces and then looked forlorn and annoyed when I left.

Printy has taken to sleeping on a folded up quilt in my wardrobe for
about 20 hours a day. She'll happily accept pats if I go in to pat
her, but her fear of being beaten up by Manson means that she doesn't
sleep on my bed any more, as she did when Jimbo was living here
(because Manson slept on Jimbo's bed then). Not that Manson sleeps on
my bed much, because he's usually outside...

I've tried sleeping in Xopher's room to see if that will keep Emily
from waking me at two hourly intervals with her howling (not that I do
anything when I wake up, but still, Not Enough Sleep, Dammit). But if
I'm sleeping in there, I'm still woken up by her, either howling or
doing something unspeakably smelly in the middle of the night. (How?
How can one tiny cat generate so much evil smell? She's got Mad Ponk
Skillz, I tell you.)

I also have this overcompensation thing going on, which means that I'm
spending a lot of time when I'm home doing research on work stuff. And
not patting the cats.